


A Memory Through Gauze Curtains

by lady_wordsmith



Series: Memories (Bucky/Reader) [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Amnesia, Angst, F/M, Memory Loss, Past Relationship(s), Reader-Insert, Romance, slight PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 12:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5784763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_wordsmith/pseuds/lady_wordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remembers only fragments, parts of you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Memory Through Gauze Curtains

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: If I owned it, I'd be rich.

_She was a tickling sensation of hair against his face. A soft laugh. Smooth, soft skin gliding against his. That breathy whisper of a name that he somehow knew was his._

_“Bucky…” the way she said his name, like a prayer, a sacrament. From her mouth, it was holy, and he could almost forget where he had come from._

_His hands were on her hips as she lay on top of him. He gazed at her, but he couldn’t make out her features. It was as if his eyes were covered with a hazy film, leaving her features just out of his vision. He brushed her hair back away from her face, tucking her hair behind her ears. As he did so, he brushed his thumbs along her cheekbones. He heard a soft sigh of pleasure, and found himself chuckling lowly in his throat._

_He could be gentle with her. Loving. All the things he had forgotten existed before. His darkness didn’t seem to bother her, didn’t even seem to exist in their tiny world._

_Her name came to his tongue. He opened his lips, but all sound seemed to cease, and the world blurred further._

* * *

 

Bucky Barnes’s eyes shot open and he found himself bolting upright. Another vivid dream.  A dream this time, not a nightmare. It didn’t matter to him much, they were all disturbing.  This one was just disturbing in a different way. The nightmares reminded him of the horrible things he had done and the horrible things done to him in turn. These dreams… They were disturbing because of how happy he was.

He wasn’t allowed to be happy. Not then. Certainly not now, even with his memory the way it was, like Swiss cheese. He remembered little of his life before, as James Buchanan Barnes, as Bucky. Most of his memories were of his time as the Winter Soldier. Those memories were crystal clear.

Except this one. Sometimes he wondered why it was so hazy, but most of the time, in his darkest times and places, he told himself it was because he was the Winter Soldier, and the Winter Soldier didn’t deserve happiness. Not after all the things he had done.

Sliding his sheets off himself, he got out of bed, and began his walk to the small kitchen in the apartment he called home. The place had been abandoned, more or less, when he moved in. None of the other apartments appeared rented except for the one across the hall, and the man who lived there appeared old and perhaps a little addled, so Bucky figured if he kept quiet, maybe the man wouldn’t figure out he lived there and turn him in to the owner.

Over time, Bucky learned the old man in the apartment across the hall _was_ the owner of the building, and had no family to look after him. At first Bucky debated killing him to avoid detection, but dismissed the plan when it became apparent the old man didn’t even know what year it was, which made him harmless. 

When Bucky had accidentally encountered Will for the first time, Will had thought Bucky was the son of a friend. Will called him Andy and asked how Richard was doing, and Bucky found himself making small talk and lying to Will with the slipperiness and ease of someone who told lies for a living. After that, sometimes Bucky looked in on the old man, always taking care to hide his metal arm under a long jacket and hoping Will was senile enough not to notice the hand. Other than that brief fear, Bucky was confident in his ability to hide in plain sight for the time being, and maybe enjoying the time spent with the guy.

After all, the man didn’t know Bucky was a deadly assassin who was probably older than Will himself. To Will, Bucky was his buddy Richard’s son Andy, who apparently had finished college the year before and was living in Will’s building rent-free while he attempted to establish a career in journalism. Will told Bucky once, after the two men shared some whiskey one night while shooting the shit, that Will considered Andy like the son he never had, because Will and his wife Edith had never had children. That had made Bucky smile, a gesture Bucky had almost forgotten, and he found himself saying, maybe not all a lie, that he considered Will a second father, which made Will pat his hand in understanding before the old man launched into another one of his tales about growing up in Las Vegas, tales Bucky found himself enjoying.

So for a while, Bucky would step outside himself and be Andy, and let the old man think it was the ‘70s. He understood Will was sick, but sometimes he wondered if perhaps Will just pretended. After all, the man had no children, his wife and all his friends were likely deceased, and this Andy that Bucky pretended to be was probably somewhere far away now, with no idea how highly Will thought of him. Will had no one, and maybe he was retreating to happier times to cope with his loneliness and loss.

Bucky sometimes envied him for that.

* * *

 

In the kitchen, Bucky made himself a cup of coffee, standing at the counter and thinking about the dream, and about other things.

Before this apartment, he had found himself always on the move. He had hid for six months after the events in D.C. and his visit to the Smithsonian in search of himself. Encountering Steve had largely been an accident. Mostly. By then, Bucky remembered bits and pieces of himself, just individual memories. Nothing was connected to anything, but he did have a rough idea of where and when what memories he did have took place.

He found himself in New York. He had found Steve there. They had talked- well, Steve talked. Bucky mostly listened. He _did_ tell Steve what little he remembered, about James Buchanan Barnes, and about Steve, and their friendship. Nothing about the Winter Soldier and nothing about _her_. She had only been some vague notion then, a voice he heard in his dreams that he could never quite describe on waking. There hadn’t been enough to tell, then. That had bothered him more than the fragments of his memory.

Steve hadn’t pushed too much when Bucky told him he wasn’t staying in New York, that he needed to think, and have more time. Steve only wrote down a number where he could be reached, and told Bucky to call him when he was ready.

From New York, Bucky bought a bus ticket to Boston. There was something in the far reaches of his mind, about Boston and the girl. It made sense at the time. And now he was here, in a rundown apartment building, and his dreams were getting stronger, more real.

The nightmares were more real, too. Bucky saw faces, and blood, and heard begging, for their lives, their children’s lives. Sometimes the faces of his dead taunted him and condemned him. Sometimes he had the hill nightmare, where he stood on a hill surrounded by the corpses he had caused, piled high above his hill. All he could see were the piles of dead surrounding him.

Sometimes the dead in his nightmares had Steve’s face, or faces that felt familiar somehow, like the one of the man in the car, who had called him Bucky, the only thing he could manage to say before… Well.

He never felt her among the dead. She was nowhere in his nightmares, featureless or otherwise. He just… Didn’t feel her there, not the way he felt her presence in his dreams, even without knowing what she looked like.

Bucky wasn’t sure if this made him feel better or not.

Taking another sip of coffee, he thought of his dreams of her. It started as nothing but darkness, the feeling of eyes on his as they slept on a floor. Her voice had been the first thing he remembered.

 

_“Are you afraid?” The voice in the darkness asked. He shook his head before realizing the owner of the voice couldn’t see him._

_“No,” he told her, for he knew somehow the owner of the voice was female._

_“I’m afraid,” the woman in the dark confessed after a long pause. “What if-“_

_“They won’t,” he cut her off. He wouldn’t go back, wouldn’t let them kill her and take him._

_“Promise?”_

_“Promise.” In the dark, he felt her press her forehead to his, and he found himself reaching for her. He told himself it was only to keep her warm, but he didn’t even believe that._

The dream/memory had ended there, and left Bucky with more questions than answers. How had the girl been connected to HYDRA? Was she even connected to them? Why had they run?

Slowly he remembered a little more about her. She had been abducted by HYDRA, for reasons neither of them knew. His memory had returned to him, in bits and pieces like now, and he knew he had had to free her and himself.

But the reasons for why he had gone to Boston and what she looked like, even her name still evaded him. More came to him in time, but these simple things remained elusive, even when he remembered large chunks of their time together.

Bucky remembered telling her his name and the vague basic things he could remember about himself. She hadn’t been familiar enough with history to recognize it, but a trip to the library had unearthed a great deal. She brought home pages and pages of things from the internet and copies of pages from a book on the Howling Commandos.

She had been there to comfort him when he remembered Steve and learned of what was thought to be his final fate. When he realized how much time had passed, and that everyone he knew and loved was likely dead.

Bucky remembered the feel of her embrace as he wept like a child, running one hand through his hair and the other up and down his back in comforting circles. She didn’t make a sound as he cried, only held him and let him weep as the enormity of the situation hit him.

After he was done with his tears and was only a shivering mass with the occasionally gulping sob, she had continued to hold him. When he finally pulled away and apologized, she only shook her head and told him that she could only imagine how hard things must be for him.

Bucky’s feelings for her didn’t surface until sometime later. It had been… one month, two? He wasn’t completely sure.  He remembered the feeling of little smiles tugging at his face as she made bad jokes when they ate and when he caught her singing to herself while she made breakfast. He called her doll and she called him corny and old-fashioned for that but he knew it made her smile just the same.

Bucky didn’t remember telling her. That hurt, but it hurt worse knowing, just _knowing_ somehow, that she returned his feelings but he couldn’t remember her saying so. It wasn’t the lack of hearing the words “I love you” that hurt. It was _knowing_ that they had been uttered and he couldn’t remember it.

He didn’t remember losing her, either. He wasn’t sure if that hurt or not. On one hand, not knowing meant he couldn’t say she was dead. On the other, he couldn’t say she wasn’t dead, either. With almost everyone else he had known before, knowing who was dead and who wasn’t, knowing how much time had passed, it hurt but there was certainty. With her, it was a blank, a missing piece.

He had too many of those already.

* * *

 

After Bucky finished his coffee, he left the cup in the sink and went back to his bed. It was queen-sized, large enough for two people, and as he lay back down, he felt a fleeting longing of a barely remembered scent of her hair and the feel of her warm body beside his. As he drifted off to sleep, he recalled a night like this.

 

_“C’mere,” he mumbled, pulling her close._

_“Another nightmare?” she asked him, burying her face in his chest. He ran a hand through her hair absently, keeping his eyes intently on their closed bedroom door._

_“Hmm.” He murmured, not saying yes or no. She knew the answer anyway. “It’s not safe here. We’ve been here too long.”_

_“Hmm.” It was her turn not to answer, but he knew she was probably still on the edge of sleep, and too focused on the warmth and closeness of him. He rarely let her sleep so close, in case his nightmares got to be too much. Tonight, though, something in him needed her close, to reassure and comfort himself in the undeniable fact of her presence._

_She raised her eyes to him, blinking quickly, and for the first_ time he realized he could see you completely. The color of your eyes, your hair, the curve of your jaw… It was all there.

 

Bucky’s eyes opened wide, and the name that came to his lips was yours. He could remember you now, all of you.

You weren’t just a fleeting memory anymore; you were a fully formed person. And Bucky thought that this hurt worst of all.


End file.
